This is an important and useful collection of Said's poetry, much of it from early in his life and career. The introduction is helpful in preparing readers for what follows and helping them parse the many cultural, artistic, literary, and personal references Said includes in his work. Highly recommended.

A short book of poems by Edward Said who is not really known as a poet. I’m not really a poetry reader usually. I found these poems interesting as they’re quite wordy but for the most part there was nothing that really stuck in my brain.

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review this!

As another reviewer on here said it; there is a reason Said is not known for his poetry. This was never really meant to be published (some really truly feel unfinished) and that it is collected will be off an interest to people studying him and his work; he is not a poet and there is no reason to make him one (his merits are known).

That being said, I do think there are beautiful moments within these poems, the first part of Desert Flowers for instance, "I fled with my hearts roof torn open, blown apart" from Wistful Music, and of course

"heard no, but hurt most certainly"

A small collection of some early poetic writings of the great thinker Edward Said, “Songs of an Eastern Humanist” is probably more of interest to people dedicated to understanding his intellectual path rather than to people just keen to read some poetry. Some poems show sections of life in Arab cities and places, often romanticized, trying to portray their vividness (“The flock of pieties that made of water, ice, of ice sherbet / To drink in the cooler summer’s night along with kismet.”), while others talk of love in an eastern setting (“As my arms awakened the air to passion, / Fierce beauty, unstilled into the calm of eastern skies.”). It is a quick read and not particularly impressive, so I recommend delving into other work of the author (and I will myself).

Thanks to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for the e-ARC.

Thank you to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Thank you to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Songs of an Eastern Humanist is a short poetry collection written by Edward Said. The Palestinian-American author is mainly known for his work as an academic, most notably his book Orientalism which is very crucial to post-colonial studies. I admit I had never read Said before, although he was mentioned during an Arab literature class I was taking a few years ago.

The introduction was much appreciated for context of course and to get an idea of what Said’s perspective and understanding of poetry was. Unfortunately, I found myself having a hard time to be receptive to his poems. It felt more like an exercise, trying his hand at poetry rather than a poet’s mastercraft, which is understanble too as it was not his main genre. Some lines were pretty and the musical imagery was quite interesting but this also showed a somewhat disparate work. I appreciated the poem “The top of my heart flung its doors apart” (p.49), in particular the first stanza but that’s about it.

I think this is an interesting project to be published as the reader learns something new about Edward Said: that he wrote a little bit of poetry too. Everyone may respond differently to poetry.

Interesting from a historical perspective, but there is a reason Said is not known for his poetry. Will have potential use in reading next to his theory, but cannot see this being read by most library patrons.

3 stars out of 5

This collection has some excellent pieces but there is just too much of this that fell a bit flat for me. Many of these pieces had parts of them that were outstanding but then that made the rest of the piece look worse than it was. The description of this collection does hit the mark with this being elusive but I don't feel like these were that much of a sensory experience, which is what was advertised and I personally love in writing. My favorite piece was "Desert Flowers" which came before the halfway point, so that definitely contributed to my lack of enjoyment in the rest.

I do think this collection would be a lot more enjoyable to people who enjoy more advanced literature, but I am not someone who usually wants to dissect a poem to understand it if I don't get it the first few times. I would still love to read more from this author in the future, especially because sometimes the small collection of an author's pieces/poems can be drastically different from the bulk of their works.


Disclaimer: I received an arc copy of this in exchange for my honest review.

This collection has some excellent merits, but it also seems to be somewhat unfinished. Its main content is an introduction and then the poems themselves, but I wonder whether it would not have benefited from a more scholarly treatment with more commentary and context.

The introduction does a great job of situating these poems with respect to Said's formation, preoccupations, and celebrated postcolonial theory and literary criticism. Timothy Brennan brings out how important literary criticism of a more aestheticist persuasion were to Said's undergraduate education. He helps the reader see how Said understood poetry as a mode of writing, even as a sensibility. Perhaps he does not, though, make enough of the fact that Said seems to have composed most of this verse in the period between 1956 and 1968, as he passed through his student years into his early days as a faculty member at Columbia.

The poetry itself is generally quite impersonal and distant, evoking a general atmosphere rather than a specific feeling. There are beautiful, evocative phrases in nearly all of the poems, but there are also many graceless slips; Brennan is right to point out how precious, even snobbish many of the allusions appearing here are. Structurally the poems are even more difficult to manage, as if one is passing through a mirage-like landscape without much to settle where it begins and ends.

If the entire collection is regarded as juvenilia (and not just "The Castle"), this perspective raises for me a question about the career of Said and how differently it may have advanced if poetry were valued similarly to scholarship. This "roguish elegist, the Arabic Till" may have taken a different path and developed into another kind of poet-scholar, had his career played out within institutions more hospitable to the cultivation of a poetic voice.

As a poet, I know how demanding it is to write a great poem than a novel. This is a collection of excellent poetry imbued with peculiar emotions. The poet touches on special topics and puts them into verse, which is very demanding.
Poetry that can be analyzed in various ways.

This collection of poems brings together a number of Edward Said's juvenilia, composed during his adolescence and early career. Together, they offer a biographical context for the development of Said's views on Orientalism. They are obvious literary exercises in a pastoral idealization of the East. Almost without exception, the poems romanticize the near East with wistful descriptions of mountain shepherds, carefree boys, early-morning bazaars, ancient temples and a pristine landscape suffused with history and beauty. Said's poems imagine the East as a place of "clean purity" and they offer sentimental panegyrics of an ancient geography that retains its elemental power. In one poem, he describes how "an eager Levantine twilight swallows the sun". The Levant is figured as a primeval land that does not "know of cycles", seemingly permanent and immutable. While the people who inhabit it may know its tragic history and remember the futilities of the past, wandering the streets crying "we are, we can, we must", the land itself seems resilient and eternal, "a fat nature snoring a sow-like sleep away". One can see in some of these poems Said's early attempts to recenter and elevate the East, reshaping global cartographies. In one poem, he begins, "The world does not measure its time from the east where the crashing noises mix with silly bleats" but while this might suggest the east as some peripheral margin, far away from Greenwich Time, the poem goes on to describe how the longings of its people defy the "bosky mists of a far-off North" and "carry an opulent new fate". The land is ripe for a new generation that will overturn Northern imperialism. Ultimately Nature will erase the castles that the "Saracens" and "Crusaders" had fought for, an apocalyptic optimism for an eventual Arabic renaissance.

In the final poem, Said imagines himself in the birdcage of the Muses only to fall from his perch and choose a different destiny as "a roguish elegist, the Arabic Till" (alluding to Till Eulenspiegel, the capering German prankster of medieval times). So with the collection as whole, these poems translate the traditional stuff of Romantic poetry onto the colonized lands of the East. In an act of literary defiance and reappropriation, he uses the vocabularies of European pastoral and medieval folksong to celebrate his colonized homeland. Overall, they are not particularly enjoyable or refined poems but they are certainly interesting as biographical documents of Said's early intellectual life.